Dreamt I was going in for brain surgery. A sketchy clinic. The head doctor (so to speak) – a frazzled woman in a tailored suit – was dashing around the front office multitasking as she described the procedure. “Endoscopic. Snap, snip, cauterize, close. Nothing to it.” I didn’t want to sit in the ratty chairs in the waiting room and stood by as she wheeled a grumbling old man out the front door on a gurney, bumping into furniture on the way. I retreated to an adjoining room, where employees were eating and smoking. One of them had some kind of seizure and fell on to the coffee table, smashing it to pieces. The others laughed. “He’s always doing that,” they explained. I decided, with uncharacteristic resolution, that I was not comfortable having brain surgery in this kind of establishment, and walked out the door. A man followed me into the parking lot and threatened me with a cigar guillotine and wooden matches, and I punched his lights out. Woke up feeling refreshed.

I went to the Party in the Park a few weeks ago and found myself in the middle of a crowd of misfits and artists and delinquents and tattooed mothers holding babies wearing ear protection and guys with leopard-print suits and perhaps misunderstood geniuses and war veterans with prosthetic legs and people of all color and all around us towers of industry and commerce echoing the funk of George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic and it seemed such a perfect peaceful way to stick it to the man, all us 99 percenters, myself included, making a noise impossible to ignore, rising up off the buildings, not conforming, not apologizing, not going away.

And then the next morning I drove to work and sat in my cube all day doing exactly what is expected of me, as usual.